This was originally going to be a book review of The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. However, at 800 pages, it’s a serious commitment, and I only made it partway through. Still, he had me convinced, and I wanted to share my thoughts on what I did get through. In the book, …
A couple months ago, I came across a blog post that mentioned Glennon Doyle. I didn’t know what that was, so off I went to Google. It turns out she’s a feminist author, and I stumbled across a 2016 blog post of hers titled Quit Hating Her. The chatter in the comments fascinated me, so …
Collective Illusions by Todd Rose explores the creation and maintenance of social lies that are fuelled by false assumptions, conformity, silence, and a lack of questioning. Drawing on social psychology and neuroscience, this book shows just how skewed these norms can be from the reality of what most people actually think. Collective illusions occur when …
The incel (a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate”) phenomenon, at least in its present incarnation, has emerged in the last decade and a bit. It’s come into the public eye through acts of violence committed by the likes of Elliot Rodger (in 2014 in Isla Vista, California) and Alek Minassian (in 2018 in Toronto, Ontario). Misogyny, …
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This week, we deviate from the mental health theme to look at Born A Crime, a memoir by Trevor Noah. I’ve been a fan of Trevor Noah for a while now. I regularly watch his late night show, The Daily Show, and I like his comedy specials on Netflix. Race and cultural differences often come …
I think online privacy is a bit of a myth, in that most of us don’t have much. So I’m curious, how important is it for you to try to maintain some modicum of privacy in the online world? I recently came across a blog that was using Hu-manity.co for data privacy management. When I …
This post was inspired by a recent post by Rory of A Guy Called Bloke, in which he asked whether the world is going downhill. It certainly does feel sometimes like the world is going to hell in a handbasket (why is that always the conveyance of choice for that particular trip?), but it’s also …
The internet has made news accessible on a scale that would have been unimaginable when I was a kid. However, the wealth of available news isn’t necessarily a good thing. With so many options, where do you get your news from? Traditional media My parents were keen TV news watchers, so I grew up being …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we have two beliefs that conflict, or our beliefs and actions don’t match, making us feel uncomfortable. The concept was originally described back in the 1950s by psychologist Leon Festinger. The …
I’ve written before about whether being politically correct is helpful or ineffective, and I wanted to explore the topic a bit more. Personally, I’m inclined to think that it does more harm than good, at least as society currently conceives it. So, is there a better way than political correctness for people to be respectful? …
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